A Cup of Tea by Katherine Mansfield

Katherine Mansfield

                                                            

                               Kathleen Mansfield Murry was a prominent New Zealand modernist short story writer and poet who was born and brought up in colonial New Zealand and wrote under the pen name of Katherine Mansfield. Wikipedia

"A Cup of Tea" is a 1922 short story by Katherine Mansfield. It was first published in the Story-Teller in May 1922. It later appeared in The Doves' Nest and Other Stories. Wikipedia

Summary of the Story

A Cup of Tea is set in 1920s London. Rosemary Fell, the protagonist, is wealthy young matron. We meet her while she is on a shopping trip in town. In an antique shop, she examines an expensive jewelry box that she would love to own. Yet, after inquiring about the price, she decides against the purchase - at least for that day.

Without the longed-for purchase, Rosemary returns to the street, where she is approached by a poor, raggedy looking young woman about her own age. The young woman asks for the price of a cup of tea and says she has no money, which Rosemary finds unimaginable.

Suddenly, inspired by the tales of Dostoevsky that she has recently read, Rosemary experiences a charitable inspiration and takes the girl home. Of course, the reader questions (as Mansfield intended) the true sincerity of Rosemary's impulse. We all believe in helping the less fortunate; however, this wealthy young woman seems more taken with her own fantasy of philanthropy than any real desire to help. At any rate, the young Miss Smith does go home with Rosemary and is given an abundant tea with all the trimmings.

While they're having tea, Mr. Fell (Phillip) comes into the bedroom and finds this unexpected guest. He takes Rosemary into another room, where he first expresses disapproval of what his wife has done and then speaks appreciatively about their poor visitor's beauty.

Once back with her charitable case, Rosemary now feels odd and without direction. What should she do? Ultimately, she gives Miss Smith some cash and sends her on her way. Anxious about her own appearance, Rosemary takes great care in dressing for dinner and seeks reassurance of her charms from Phillip.

A Cup of Tea Themes:

The main theme of the story is class distinction and materialism. This story pictures the differential behaviour of the upper class towards the lower class through the character of Rosemary. Her attitude and behavior gives quite a clear image of the mentality possessed by discriminating elites. Materialism is rigidly followed by the upper class. The more they have, the more they want and they don’t want anything ordinary, they want the best of all, the extraordinary, unaffordable by the commons. Their want for more never dies. The velvet box in the story symbolizes materialism while the cup of tea symbolizes the equal needs and requirements of the rich and the poor.

A Cup of Tea Characters:

This story is comprised of these few prominent characters.

ROSEMARY FELL:

A socially poised, rich married woman with a devoted and loving husband, who has a great lifestyle. She is well-dressed and well off with all the luxuries she desires for. Her interest is mainly of reading books, always indulged and above all greatly inspired by the characters and their adventurous lives which she comes across in the stories. Her inspirational interest can be judged from the decision she takes when she interacts with a poor soul called Miss Smith by taking her home with a mere thought of it being an adventure for her recalling the stories of Dostoevsky. Apart from this possession and insecurity can be sensed in her character.

PHILIPS FELL:

Husband of Rosemary, is in fact one of the richest persons of his society. He loves his wife devotedly and cares for her a lot. He calls Miss Smith pretty much to his wife’s chagrin, just to make her send Miss Smith away as she refuses to do so when he asks her in the first place even though making his wife feel insecure about herself and her beauty.

MISS SMITH:

She is a lean and thin poor girl of just the age of Rosemary. She can’t even afford a single cup of tea and comes to ask Rosemary to pay her the price of a cup of tea. She is an odd person, frightened and confused. She is shocked when Rosemary asks her to have a cup of tea with her at her home. In Mr. Philips’ point of view Miss Smith is very attractive and pretty.

THE SHOPKEEPER:

The owner of a very beautiful antique ornaments shop which in fact was one of Rosemary’s favorite shops. He would always be looking forward to have Rosemary at his shop and always saving a lovely piece of art for her only just like he had been saving the eye catching blue velvet box.

The Postmaster by Rabindranath Tagore

Rabindranath Tagore

                                                           

                             Rabindranath Tagore FRAS, also known by his pen name Bhanu Singha Thakur, and also known by his sobriquets Gurudev, Kabiguru, and Biswakabi, was a polymath, poet, musician, and artist from the Indian subcontinent. Wikipedia

Rabindranath Tagore: Short Stories Summary and Analysis of "The Postmaster"

Summary

For his first job, the Postmaster is assigned to work in the village of Ulapur, a quiet backwater with an indigo factory. He feels sorely out of place in the village, feeling both too sophisticated as a Calcutta man amongst uneducated villagers, and needlessly arrogant to the very people who he might turn to, hoping for friendship.

For lack of anything better to do, the Postmaster takes to writing poetry about his scenic surroundings, pontificating on rain-soaked leaves and the like as a way to express his deepest sorrows. Since he doesn’t make much money, the Postmaster cooks for himself and enlists a young orphan girl named Ratan to help him with housework in exchange for some food.

One night while Ratan is preparing his hookah, the Postmaster asks her to describe her family. This begins a relationship where the two share intimate details about their families, with the Postmaster divulging how much he misses his mother and sister back in Calcutta. The rapport develops to such an extent that Ratan starts to consider the Postmaster’s family her own.

One day while watching a bird in a tree, the Postmaster is taken by a desperate need for female companionship, for someone who he could share this sighting of a bird with. He calls Ratan into his office and informs her that he’s going to teach her how to read. These lessons continue until the Postmaster falls ill and he grows unable and unwilling to continue. Ratan, regardless, practices what he has taught her. Fed up with the village and his illness, the Postmaster applies for a transfer and is denied.

Nonetheless, he quits the job to return home, and tells Ratan as much. Ratan begs him to take her with him, but he smugly tells her that’s impossible. He promises her that the next Postmaster will take care of her, but that does nothing to comfort her. Upon leaving, he tries to give Ratan money, but she refuses.

As the Postmaster is leaving, he is struck by a feeling that he should go back and take Ratan, but concludes that life is full of separations and endings, so what’s the point? Ratan doesn’t have the same view though, and holds out, in anguish, for the possibility that the Postmaster will return to take her to Calcutta.

Analysis

“The Postmaster” is one of Tagore’s bleaker stories, spun around two immensely lonely characters whose only chance to end their loneliness is squandered. While as readers we may yearn for the happy ending where the Postmaster returns to the village to whisk Ratan away, Tagore instead uses these characters to lay out a parable about interpersonal relationships in developing modernity under British imperial rule of India.

Key here is the fact that the Postmaster is sent to the village of Ulapur as a colonial agent of the British, so that this little industry town can have a functioning post office. The Postmaster is, in turn, an agent of the British economic and colonial projects in India. Naturally they would select an educated man, but the price of the Postmaster putting that education to good use is finding working conditions that alienate him. Such alienation was a common condition of people involved with industry in the late 1800s (the time this story was written), and was a trope explored by writers ranging from Charles Dickens to Karl Marx.

At the end of the story, we get a contrast between the educated Postmaster’s “philosophy” and Ratan’s uneducated naivete. These are cast as equal burdens, with the Postmaster’s flippant decision to leave Ratan behind because life is full of separations and deaths portrayed as comparably tragic to Ratan’s delusional hope that Ratan might one day return to the village for her. It’s a mysterious little parable that doesn’t have a clear moral, but rather offers a meditation on a fundamental human tragedy that undergirds both loneliness and desire.

Work cite

https://www.gradesaver.com/rabindranath-tagore-short-stories/study-guide/summary-the-postmaster

La Belle Dame sans Merci Poem by John Keats

"La Belle Dame sans Merci" is a ballad produced by the English poet John Keats in 1819. The title was derived from the title of a 15th-century poem by Alain Chartier called La Belle Dame sans Mercy. Considered an English classic, the poem is an example of Keats' poetic preoccupation with love and death. Wikipedia

Analysis of La Belle Dame sans Merci

La Belle Dame sans Merci with its mysterious narrative and ethereal atmosphere, combines innocence and seduction in an unusual ballad form to produce a haunting story.

In one sense it's little more than man meets woman in the countryside, they have a fling and the man ends up dumped, by a lake. He doesn't know if he's been drugged or not but it certainly seems he has been intimate with this beautiful stranger.

It's up to the reader to fill in the details.

Perhaps this is why the poem is so successful in its portrayal of a relationship that came out of nowhere, progressed to a different dimension and had such a profound effect on the male, and probably the female too.

The reader is left hanging on, with a need to know more, thanks to the metrical pattern of the stanzas and the bizarre circumstances the man finds himself in.

And in certain sections of the poem there is the suggestion of a sexual liaison which is perhaps drug inspired. Notably, stanzas five and seven stand out, with mention of the man making garlands and bracelets and a fragrant girdle (Zone) whilst the woman made sweet moan. And later she finds sweet roots, honey wild and manna dew (manna is the food from heaven as stated in the Bible), most certainly the food of love.

To His Coy Mistress by Andrew Marvell

                                             

                                   

                     Andrew Marvell was an English metaphysical poet, satirist and politician who sat in the House of Commons at various times between 1659 and 1678. During the Commonwealth period he was a colleague and friend of John Milton. Wikipedia

Summary:

The poem is spoken by a male lover to his female beloved as an attempt to convince her to sleep with him. The speaker argues that the Lady’s shyness and hesitancy would be acceptable if the two had “world enough, and time.” But because they are finite human beings, he thinks they should take advantage of their sensual embodiment while it lasts.

He tells the lady that her beauty, as well as her “long-preserved virginity,” will only become food for worms unless she gives herself to him while she lives. Rather than preserve any lofty ideals of chastity and virtue, the speaker affirms, the lovers ought to “roll all our strength, and all / Our sweetness, up into one ball.” He is alluding to their physical bodies coming together in the act of lovemaking.

Analysis:

Marvell wrote this poem in the classical tradition of a Latin love elegy, in which the speaker praises his mistress or lover through the motif of carpe diem, or “seize the day.” The poem also reflects the tradition of the erotic blazon, in which a poet constructs elaborate images of his lover’s beauty by carving her body into parts. Its verse form consists of rhymed couplets in iambic tetrameter, proceeding as AA, BB, CC, and so forth.

The speaker begins by constructing a thorough and elaborate conceit of the many things he “would” do to honor the lady properly, if the two lovers indeed had enough time. He posits impossible stretches of time during which the two might play games of courtship. He claims he could love her from ten years before the Biblical flood narrated in the Book of Genesis, while the Lady could refuse his advances up until the “conversion of the Jews,” which refers to the day of Christian judgment prophesied for the end of times in the New Testament’s Book of Revelations.

The speaker then uses the metaphor of a “vegetable love” to suggest a slow and steady growth that might increase to vast proportions, perhaps encoding a phallic suggestion. This would allow him to praise his lady’s features – eyes, forehead, breasts, and heart – in increments of hundreds and even thousands of years, which he says that the lady clearly deserves due to her superior stature. He assures the Lady that he would never value her at a “lower rate” than she deserves, at least in an ideal world where time is unlimited.

Marvell praises the lady’s beauty by complimenting her individual features using a device called an erotic blazon, which also evokes the influential techniques of 15th and 16th century Petrarchan love poetry. Petrarchan poetry is based upon rarifying and distancing the female beloved, making her into an unattainable object. In this poem, though, the speaker only uses these devices to suggest that distancing himself from his lover is mindless, because they do not have the limitless time necessary for the speaker to praise the Lady sufficiently. He therefore constructs an erotic blazon only to assert its futility.

The poem’s mood shifts in line 21, when the speaker asserts that “Time's winged chariot” is always near. The speaker’s rhetoric changes from an acknowledgement of the Lady’s limitless virtue to insisting on the radical limitations of their time as embodied beings. Once dead, he assures the Lady, her virtues and her beauty will lie in the grave along with her body as it turns to dust. Likewise, the speaker imagines his lust being reduced to ashes, while the chance for the two lovers to join sexually will be lost forever.

The third and final section of the poem shifts into an all-out plea and display of poetic prowess in which the speaker attempts to win over the Lady. He compares the Lady’s skin to a vibrant layer of morning dew that is animated by the fires of her soul and encourages her to “sport” with him “while we may.” Time devours all things, the speaker acknowledges, but he nonetheless asserts that the two of them can, in fact, turn the tables on time. They can become “amorous birds of prey” that actively consume the time they have through passionate lovemaking.

Work cite

https://www.gradesaver.com/andrew-marvell-poems/study-guide/summary-to-his-coy-mistress

Daffodils

                   

William Wordsworth's  poem Daffodils

 The speaker says that, wandering like a cloud floating above hills and valleys, he encountered a field of daffodils beside a lake. The dancing, fluttering flowers stretched endlessly along the shore, and though the waves of the lake danced beside the flowers, the daffodils outdid the water in glee.

Summary

The speaker says that, wandering like a cloud floating above hills and valleys, he encountered a field of daffodils beside a lake. The dancing, fluttering flowers stretched endlessly along the shore, and though the waves of the lake danced beside the flowers, the daffodils outdid the water in glee. The speaker says that a poet could not help but be happy in such a joyful company of flowers. He says that he stared and stared, but did not realize what wealth the scene would bring him. For now, whenever he feels “vacant” or “pensive,” the memory flashes upon “that inward eye / That is the bliss of solitude,” and his heart fills with pleasure, “and dances with the daffodils.”

Form

The four six-line stanzas of this poem follow a quatrain-couplet rhyme scheme: ABABCC. Each line is metered in iambic tetrameter.

Commentary

This simple poem, one of the loveliest and most famous in the Wordsworth canon, revisits the familiar subjects of nature and memory, this time with a particularly (simple) spare, musical eloquence. The plot is extremely simple, depicting the poet’s wandering and his discovery of a field of daffodils by a lake, the memory of which pleases him and comforts him when he is lonely, bored, or restless. The characterization of the sudden occurrence of a memory—the daffodils “flash upon the inward eye / Which is the bliss of solitude”—is psychologically acute, but the poem’s main brilliance lies in the reverse personification of its early stanzas. The speaker is metaphorically compared to a natural object, a cloud—“I wandered lonely as a cloud / That floats on high...”, and the daffodils are continually personified as human beings, dancing and “tossing their heads” in “a crowd, a host.” This technique implies an inherent unity between man and nature, making it one of Wordsworth’s most basic and effective methods for instilling in the reader the feeling the poet so often describes himself as experiencing  SparkNotes

Tughlaq

Tughlaq

Girish Karnad's play Tughlaq explores the character of one of the most fascinating kings to occupy the throne in Delhi, namely, Mohammed-bin-Tughlaq. He ruled for 26 years, a period of unparalleled cruelty and agonising existence for his subjects.

Prof. Asha Kuthari Chaudhuri then of the Gauhati University at Guwahati, has said[10] of the play: "Tughlaq is based on the life and story of Mohammad-bin-Tughlaq -- the most controversial ruler of the Delhi sultanate. Tughlaq is defined as a historical play because the chief protagonist is a character taken from history and the play documents a series of past events that took place during the reign of Mohammad-bin-Tughlaq. Tughlaq can also be considered as a political play as it represents the reign of a king and his various moves to unify the Hindus and Muslims, and establish a just kingdom in Delhi."

Writing in 2012, the research scholar M. Jagadeswari, argues[11]: "Girish Karnad is the foremost playwright of modern India. Tughlaq, his second play, is a historical play replete with symbolism.... In the play, the symbols have a myriad of origin as well as forms. He used symbols to represent universal thoughts and emotions. His use of various symbols in the play such as Chess, Aziz and Aazam, Prayer, Python, Daulatabad, Rose and birds like Vulture add greater emotional and associative significance."

Characters

Tughlaq

The Sultan Muhammad-bin-Tughlaq is the central figure of the play, Tughlaq. He is the protagonist/ antagonist of the play. Many of the critics are of the opinion that Karnad’s Tughlaq is caricature of Pt. Jawaharlal Nehru. He is very intelligent and works very hard for the people. He becomes successful to kill Sheikh Imam-ud-din and Ain-ul-Mulk in a single stroke. This double-facedness of Tughlaq can be compared with modern politicians

.

Baran

Barani plays significant part in Girish Karnad’s plays. Karnad has used historical background while writing

Tughlaq and The Dreams of Tipu Sultan.In both these plays he has used a fictional histori

an named Barani. His character is contrast to Najib who is a politician. To him history is not made only in straight crafts; its lasting results are produced in the ranks of learned

men. Like Najib, Barani is also the favourite of Sultan but unlike Najib, he is an idealist. He is a good man and sees goodness in everyone. He is a moderate and temperate. He does not want violence. He praises the Sultan’s generous and kind deeds and does not approve of his killings

and murders. He is a scholar historian standing for the virtues of life.He is a simple, good and an honest advisor to the Sultan completely unaware of intrigues and treachery.

Sheikh Imam-ud-din

He is a holy character of India who defies the Sultan and meets his death by being caught in the trap of the Sultan. He is a bold and courageous man and is a great fiery speaker. He boldly tells the people that Muhammad is a murderer of his father and brother. The Sheikh

is a man of courage and integrity. He warns Sultan against making verbal distinctions between religion and politics. But he is trapped by Muhammad in hisplan and he is killed in the battle.

The Step-mother

The Step-mother of Tughlaq is the only important female character in the play. She is worried about the health and welfare of Tughlaq. She is worried about his late nights. As she dislikes many of Tughlaq’s advisors, she requests Barani to promise her not to leave the Sultan – ever – whatever he does. She comes to the conclusion that Najib is responsible for the killings in the state. She manages the murder of Najib and for that Tughlaq gives order for her being sent to prison and stoned to death. The Sultan loses a good advisor.

Plot

By no means can the plot of Tughlaqbe called Aristotelian. The playwright has flaunted the unities of time and place. The action of the playtakes place first of all in Delhi in the year 1327,then from the road from Delhi to Daulatabad and lastly in and around the fort at Daulatabad five years later. The unity of action implies that all the episodes in the play must be knit together to form the whole. Not a single episode or incident can be removed from the structure without a loss. In Tughlaq, there are many superfluous incidents e.g. the episode of Aziz and Hindu woman and the episode of Aziz with a family containing six illegal children. Many scenes regarding bloodshed and murders are narrated and not shown directly on the stage. Only the gruesome murder of Sihab-ud-din is enacted on the stage. The stepmother of the Sultan is shown being dragged by the soldiers.In Greek plays, the episodes regarding murders, bloodshed and other horrorful actions are narrated and are not shown onthe stage. Karnad weaves the story of Aazam and Aziz with the main tragic story of Tughlaq. Karnad has become successful in creating suspense in the play by keeping in abeyance the happy fate of Aziz. Though he cheats the Sultan, instead of being killed or tortured, he is rewarded by the Sultan. Girish Karnad uses suggesting method in developing the plot of Tughlaq Karnad has skillfully woven the plot. He knits together the comic story of Aziz and the tragic tale of life of Muhammad. Many critics are of the opinion thatTughlaq is a political allegory based on Pt. Jawaharlal Nehru’s era and it comments directly or indirectly the plans introduced by Jawaharlal Nehru. Tughlaqdeals with the last five years of the reign of Tughlaq. And whatever else we need to know we learn from what others tell us of him.

This has been done in the interest of dramatic effectiveness. The dramatist introduces tension and conflict which are essentialfor plot, in the very beginning and all the events and actions of characters intensify conflict until it reaches the climax. The subplot related with Aziz and Aazam runs parallel to the main plot. It is employed for the purpose of burlesque. In other words it is introduced inthe way of ridicule. And in order to achieve the target it was deliberately written in the convention of the company Natak.

Group work on The Da Vinci Code